Showing 1 - 10 of 108
Love, beauty, violence
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/05/2024
» Last year, the world embraced Barbie and Poor Things, two outstanding films that tapped into the state of female consciousness in the 21st century. At the 77th Cannes Film Festival, which ends tomorrow, women-driven stories of all stripes are pushed further up (or down) the emotional spectrum. A noticeable number of titles premiering at the influential festival feature female protagonists in varying states of joy and distress -- and to varying results. Powerful acting by female talent also injects life and spirit into those stories, hailing from all corners of the Earth.
A Thai actor takes the stage at Cannes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/05/2024
» In a dreary rural town in Taiwan, illegal Southeast Asian workers live a precarious existence toiling away in farms or homes while enduring tough bosses and prying authorities. Most of them are from the Philippines or Indonesia, but there are also a large number from Myanmar and Thailand.
Cannes asks: Cinema anyone?
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/05/2024
» To remind us that we're here because of cinema, the 77th Cannes Film Festival did an uncanny double bill on its first day. The festival opened on Tuesday and will run until May 25. On the first afternoon, before the ritzy kerfuffle of the opening red carpet, Cannes screened the first part of the restored 1927 silent film Napoleon, an audacious epic of the French Revolution by Abel Gance, who 97 years ago tested the limits of what cinema could do with exhilarating results (the entire film runs for seven hours; we were treated to the first four here).
Asean Film Festival is finally here
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/03/2024
» Despite the odd, unexplained double postponement -- the first when it was moved from early December 2023 to late January 2024, and then from January to March -- the Bangkok Asean Film Festival finally gets under way, from today until Sunday at SF CentralWorld. Despite the adjournment, the line-up looks decent, with the best Southeast Asian titles culled from the past year -- Tiger Stripes, Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell, Abang Adik, Dreaming And Dying, Oasis Of Now, Nowhere Near, Morrison, Thai classics The Adventure Of Sudsakorn and The Adulterer, and a short film competition.
The way I see it...
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/03/2022
» Ahead of the Academy Awards on Monday, our film critic shares his thoughts on the big runners.
Time for Asean films to shine
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/12/2021
» The pandemic notwithstanding, it has been a stimulating year for Southeast Asian cinema. Reflective, heartfelt and oddball new titles from Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand have won major prizes or become critical favourites at international film festivals throughout 2021. Now, many of these films are coming to the big screen in Thailand as the Bangkok Asean Film Festival 2021 (BAFF) is set to open tonight.
Time is not on anybody's side
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/10/2021
» There's the anatomy -- the bone and the flesh, supple or flaccid. Then there's time, the cruellest judge of all. In Jakrawal Nilthamrong's Anatomy Of Time (the Thai title is simpler, Wela), the first sound we hear is a tick-tock metronome like the soundtrack of the cosmos as we watch an old lady gently tending to her tubed and bedbound husband. Time will be folded back. The old woman will become young and her dying husband will appear as a spirited, dashing military captain fighting communist insurgents for the good of the nation.
Apichatpong's memory of the world
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/06/2021
» It begins with a bang. Maybe the Big Bang, a culmination of cosmic murmur and subterranean hum that explodes like a burst of revelation, a sonic release of the weight of all human pain. In Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new film Memoria, a woman wakes up one morning in Bogota jolted by a mysterious sound -- a metallic, visceral, bottom-of-the-well bang. The woman, orchid farm owner Jessica (played by Tilda Swinton), wanders the Colombian capital in a daze, haunted by the unshakable aural echo, then leaves the city and heads to the mountains, where the phantom of the bang shadows her.
Asean on screen
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/09/2020
» Ahead of the BAFF featuring Southeast Asian movies plus Chinese and Japanese titles, Life spoke with two filmmakers about their work
Uncle Boonmee at 10
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/05/2020
» Rumour had spread early that morning that the Thai film would win big that night. How big? We daren't dream. The runner-up prize maybe? The Cannes grapevine, in those embryonic days of Facebook and Twitter, was fairly dependable but not downright on the money. It gives you the shape but never the details. The Thai film "will definitely win something", said one of my supposedly well-connected friends, accompanied by a speculative wink.